April 11th, 2014

Daily Activities Include: filing, forwarded email

T. has been wanting me to forward him a lot of the email I receive from people he knows. Recently, he got R. to order him a toy from the Talking Friends store. It didn't ship ... and didn't ship, even tho the identical toy ordered by me for A. (which prompted T. to want one of his own *sigh*) shipped and arrived very quickly. Hmmm. R. sent them email, they looked into it and it is, in theory, now headed our way. T. asked R. to forward the email telling R. that -- and then without anyone else being involved, T. then forwarded that to both my email addresses.

Okay, so, then, learning is definitely occurring.

I put labels on files today. I've been doing this on and off since the Big Purge some months (a year?) ago, and I'm mostly there. This should help with keeping up with the filing, which honestly should not be hard to keep up with because we've eliminated so much paper from our lives that there just isn't that much left. I also purged some additional school paperwork that didn't really seem like we needed to keep it. It's hard to know what to keep, because my kids get way more paperwork than is typical so the usual rules are not obvious to translate. However, I've been trying to learn from other people's experience, and if keeping it just means you throw it all away 20 years later, I don't see any reason to keep it now. It would be different if wonderful progress were _not_ occurring and I wanted to be able to document that (and what I had been told had been tried so far).

I also created the 2014 tax year folder and separated the 2014 tax year items from the 2013 tax year items, so I am honestly running out of things to do other than sit my ass down in front of the PC and start selecting things in TurboTax. I keep telling myself, Self, every year this gets easier -- it is not the nightmare it once was, and besides, you don't actually need to finish, you just need to come up with some sort of estimate to put on the extension.

But Self is not buying it. Self is quailing in abject fear and terror. Self is being really ridiculous.

Oh, JewishGen, powered by ancestry.com. You're so cute.

I hadn't logged in to this no-cost genealogy website for a long while -- 556 days, I think it said. It wanted me to confirm my information, and then I was off to change the password, because it was one of my weaker passwords and a duplicate and I am slogging through the slow process of de-duping (I'm doing this slowly, largely because of the certificate issue -- so I'm only updating things LastPass tells me to update, and then experimenting with a few others to see how they handle changes. This was an experiment).

First, it's kind of a PITA to figure out where people hide the Change Your Password option. But okay. I'm building a repertoire of the various possibilities and getting faster. Also, some sites are very annoying about whether they allow nonalphanumeric characters (they either don't allow or require them). But yeah, whatever. Generally speaking, you have to confirm your password (_after_ producing it to log in in the first place) to change it, and then you have to enter it twice. Quora.com only requires it once, so that's something. And JewishGen doesn't require a password confirm. Then on top of that, JewishGen displays the password _in the clear_ after you change it AND it emails you your entire profile INCLUDING the in the clear password after, and there's no obvious way to make it not do so.


In good news, I've spent several minutes trying to imagine any way that anyone could cause me any amount of trouble if they hacked into JewishGen. And I'm coming up with absolutely nothing, which is in stark contrast to netflix. I canceled that a while ago, and I went over there to update the password (weak, duplicate AND they've updated their certificate so It Was Time and LastPass told me to). I keep trying to figure out how to delete my account (I think I have to call) or at least the last payment method used (can't even zero that out!!!). It's hard to see it being hugely problematic; the last four digits of a credit card are pretty easily accessible, altho I understand that people have used the last four as part of a social engineering hack to get more.

I'm remembering, once again, why I just couldn't be bothered to come up with unique, strong passwords for all of these sites. What is the point if they're just going to fricking email the thing to me?

Daily Activities Include: taxes, passwords, school, toy store

T. says he wants to go on vacation. So do I, but spring break isn't for another week.

In the meantime, he went to school today, as did A. They went swimming at the Thoreau Club and then went to Wendy's. He read "Fly Guy" to his class today! Which made him a teacher. :-) Then he went home, he says.

Today, I walked with M. I worked on taxes. I changed a few passwords. I went to Red Raven for lunch with R. They have a really great starter which is brussel sprouts which normally is made with butter but they substituted oil, but left in the wonderful maple and bacon. It went well with my mussels and frites. I also got them to bring me a stout in an 8 oz glass, thus reducing the temptation to have Too Damn Much Beer with lunch (I'm really a lightweight these days, especially midday).

The kids have been having fun with noisy putty, which when you push on it into the container, makes farting sounds. It's pretty hilarious.